People selling ransomware tools are not legal companies regulated by the Israeli and US government. If NSO didn't pay income tax or wasn't regulated by governments I'd agree.

To be clear: I think the poor job regulating tools like Pegasus by governments is due to their incompetence in regulating this sort of weapon not to gain something.

I also think a lot of this PR is because NSO likes it to get more clients as this sort of PR shows that their tool works - you never hear this sort of PR about their many many competitors in this space (like Verint, HackingTeam etc).

We are enabling them instead of shutting them down which is unfortunate.

Similarly if you were making stealth fighter jets underground and selling them to dictators it'd be more like ransomware.

the definition of ransomeware tools can be hard imho. There is still an ongoing discussion about what are hacking tools and sometimes wireshark is called as example.

E.g. they describe their tools as:

> develops best-in-class technology to help government agencies detect and prevent a wide-range of local and global threats.

Only if their customers are state actors